Brightfellow

by Rikki Ducornet

  There are islands in my room, Stub tells Jenny. Would you like to see them?

  That weekend his father comes home. He carries a small false-leather suitcase for his shirts and underwear and an orange leather valise with brass bumpers and tacks. Inside, packages of seeds are tucked in careful rows. To see the valise open stuns the senses (Jenny). Who could have known how beautiful packages of seeds could be? Even the radishes are a revelation. The purple beets look like people, Jenny says, all tummy with leaves. Things from another, newer world. Somewhere, she decides, vegetables are as prized as rubies. Somewhere people make ruby soup and rings out of radishes.

  He can see that Jenny makes his father uncomfortable. Night settles in. Jenny eats a sandwich in her room. Then, even as they are still at supper, she starts sudsing her hands.

  That night he dreams of ants overtaking the house. They get into the radio and walk off with his mother’s voice. Outside, the air is thick and fast with fistfuls of greasy snow. The following evening his father is stuck upstate and his mother stranded in Kahontsi. Stranded is sweet sugar on the tongue. He imagines his mother standing alone in a cold room looking out the window with a frown on her face. Fully dressed in her winter coat, muff, fur hat, fur-lined boots and gloves—she has run out of things to say and she is frowning. Wires are down, the streets are still, and Jenny makes rice. They spend the next day at the kitchen table building houses out of stiff paper, held together with tape and glue. A hardware store, a barbershop, a post office, a firehouse, and a water tower. Jenny makes bologna sandwiches with tender Wonder Bread and pungent mustard, and after lunch they build a bell tower because a town needs a bell in case of emergencies. Emergencies, they make a list, consist of: fires, enemy attacks, meteors, people running amok. Wolves can overtake a place and so can outlaws. We need a cemetery, says Jenny. A bakery, says Stub, with pies in the window. They build a water tower with legs made of pencils that refuses to stand up. This water tower, says Jenny, has a mind all its own. I’m putting cracker crumbs in the bakery, says Stub, to make sure the ants come by to check this all out.

  Jenny proposes: a hotel for insomniacs. An observatory from which to consider the question: just what sort of cheese is the moon made of? A river that spills all of the world’s anger into a pool where everything sighs.

  That night they sleep together like brother and sister. The snow keeps on coming and in the morning there is so much of it banked up against the front door they can’t open it. They eat bologna and rice pudding and spend the day making a library stacked with important books for elephants: The Nature of Trumpeting. How to Protect Your Assets. She figures out a way to keep the water tower from falling over. When the telephone rings they are in the thick of it and cannot, do not, answer. Jenny says: That will be your mother. Stub says: I’d like pygmies to live in this village. We’ll make a jungle, says Jenny. And put the village smack in the middle. That way they can play all day in the jungle and come home at night and eat pie.

  Jenny turns up the thermostat. She cleans the house. The bathroom is spotless, the linoleum in Stub’s room has been scrubbed and rinsed many times over and then waxed to a High Shine. Words you can say breathing in and out: breathe in: High; breathe out: Shine. A magical incantation. Jenny and Stub breathe together, stepping from island to island on the sparkling linoleum. Can you, he asks, hear the elephants? Yes. And I can already see them, swimming light as bubbles. Looking at their legs the fish think they are dead heads. Fish have very short memories. If an injustice is done to them, they forget all about it. You can hook a fish over and over. Its mouth bleeds and it wonders why. If you hook it, gut it, clean it, cook it, eat it, digest it, shit it—it will not remember. But elephants remember everything. Just like we do.

  Late afternoon. Outside the white witches of the air are busy packing up their needles and bits of unfinished tatting. Mother is trapped in Kahontsi, Stub says. Trapped in Kahontsi, Jenny agrees. Trapped in a teepee! Jenny dares. Trapped in a teepee! laughs Stub. The phone rings and rings and then it stops.

  Jenny fetches a book from her room. By Verner Vanderloon, an old man who lives in seclusion somewhere by the river. A book with pictures as strange as the strangest thing you can think of. A small book bound in green leather, almost black, with silver letters pressed into the cover. Stub rubs a finger over them and with Jenny’s help reads: Ancient Roots and Ways. I stole it, Jenny whispers, from the Half Way House. She explains that the Half Way House is where she was when she was halfway here, on her way, although she didn’t know it yet, to him, to Stub. Now, now, she says, putting her arm around him when she sees the familiar troubled look on his face, I’ve always been halfway here, you know? Until I got here! Look at this!

  Jenny opens the book and there is a picture of the skulls of apes: baboon, orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee. She reads the names aloud to him. From that moment on he cannot look at the letter B without seeing the skull of a baboon. Jenny turns the page and together they look at the skulls of men from long ago, before they were people, when they were only halfway here.

  You know, Jenny tells him, we still have our monkey ways.

  The next day the sun is shining and the snow truck elbows past. There is a deep white road where minutes before there was none. A deep white road like the one his father is taking south, his winter hat on his head and his beautiful valise beside him. His mother, too, is traveling. On roller skates with wheels spinning so fast they are invisible. His mother tears down the white road in her tweeds all the way from Kahontsi across the frozen river carrying her lipstick and her keys, a brown paper bag with a fresh package of margarine, one blood-red spot smack in the middle, her hair fried and stuck to her head. Or maybe she will breeze in with hot Chinese noodles and a story she will tell them breathlessly, happy as a lark. Or she’ll come in angry, steaming, shouting: Why didn’t you answer the phone? And smack Stub, and smack Jenny, and Jenny will break apart and all her pretty pins and springs will spill out across the floor and that will be that.

  Ever after he will wonder: Why was Jenny sent away? Two years later his mother, too, disappears, wanting more of the world, more of life. And there they are, Stub and his dad, sitting in silence face to face, the favorite green and white dishes scowling and cold to the touch, the linoleum purged of magic and Stub breaking the silence with another nagging question, the only question: Why can’t we bring Jenny home? Because of another mouth to feed, Jenny’s mouth a big hungry O eating the orange, seeds and all. Besides, no one knows where she’s gone. Kahontsi, maybe.

  “Not Kahontsi.”

  “Maybe Ohneka, then.”

  “People don’t just disappear.”

  “They do. All the time.”

  His dad’s valise replaced by a box of plumbing tools. Lonely work. Sometimes it’s hard to persevere. (His father’s words.)

  TWO

  ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER, the world goes on forever, unspooling, and just when you think you know it, something happens, the summer is snatched away by an ice storm, a blizzard dissolves the spring, there are moths in sudden numbers, an unprecedented migration of geese. Autumn arrives unparalleled in its beauties. The river gleams, there are shad and snapping turtles, quantities of water chestnuts, and under porches: copperheads.

  If America has gods, this is where they dwell—under rocks, in the branches of trees, in ivy, skunkweed, the hearts of fish, the flight of geese. But—everyone says it—things no longer shine as they once did. Ever since the war, everything is dimmer.

  When he was very little he knew—if only for a brief moment—that the world was imbued with light. That he came into the world beaming and burning. He was always combusting. He was enchanted.

  Here is a curious paradox: he is a man, quick as a whip, thin as a razor, by acts of will invisible, someone who snakes about, who is always needing (ah! This pesky need of his!) to puzzle the world back together again, to polish the pieces and make them shine. But as he was undone so early he cannot know—no matter how avidly he watches the
lives around him unfold—where his pieces go, and this despite his desperate, his imperious need to gather the pieces together (and he is tireless), to see it all fall into place.

  He grew up three miles down the road from the campus, in a place so small it was known by the name of its one bar: Annie’s. When he was growing up and a kid asked him where he lived, he’d say up the road from Annie’s. If they had not heard of Annie’s he’d say ’bout four miles east of town. Meaning Hawkskill, where the school was, the post office and dry-goods store—all that—and the hotel-restaurant that still fills up when folks drop their kids off, turn up for Christmas break, Easter, graduation. For this reason Hawkskill is called a college town, although there is not much there to attract students. The rest of the time the hotel clients are traveling salesmen, and in cider season, on the long weekend of the county fair, tourists.

  When he was a boy, and this happened a year or two after his mother left, his father took him and his grandmother out for a big midday meal to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday. She had turned eighty and they ate roast beef and gravy with Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes. His father, usually taciturn, talked about what he’d seen and been bewildered by on the campus—students kissing in public, even mixed couples; he disliked the girls’ wild hair. Their bare feet and thighs. Their untamed, their graceful ways. Shameless, he complained. But the day he saw a kid playing a fiddle on the commons, playing it well, he thought it was tremendous.

  When Stub turns nine, he decides to check out the campus for himself. Near summer’s end, he walks the three miles and finds it deserted. He wanders freely, enthralled by the expansive beauty of the place, the inscrutable stone buildings, the ink of their shadows, the impossible grass curving toward a forested horizon. Lying down in a saucer of grass beside a flagpole, its flag, too, at rest, he thinks he could haunt this place, move along the many dark recesses beneath the walls and plantings and not be seen. Somewhere a clock chimes the hour and he looks up at the sky and thinks that everything he learns must be put to good use.

  In front of the library he comes upon kids his own age, faculty brats (his dad’s words), he supposes, playing kick the can. The can has been kicked, and as they scatter they look at him with disdain—or so he thinks—and dash away with a piece of him. He feels ashamed, somehow. Corroded. But the library is open, and bravely he walks in. As he passes the front desk the librarian welcomes him, standing up from his chair, which doesn’t make him any taller. “I am so pleased you have come in,” he says, “you’re the first person I’ve seen all day. But I haven’t seen you before.”

  “My dad works here,” Stub tells him. “Fixing things.”

  “What’s his name? Perhaps I’ve met him.”

  “Jiggs Wiznet,” Stub tells him. “I’m Stub.”

  “I know Jiggs Wiznet!” the librarian exclaims. “He fixed the library toilets and he did a nice job. It makes good sense you both share the same last name. I’m Axel.” As he speaks he scribbles something on a small square of stiff paper that turns out to be a library card. “If I were named Stub Wiznet, well . . . it would be perfect. I’m the dwarf, after all.” He sighs softly. “Want to trade?”

  “A dwarf?”

  “Our time here is so brief—one day you’ll see what I mean—and it would be better to have a perfect name.” He hands Stub a card. “If I were a wrestler, well . . . Axel would do me fine. Are you wanting anything in particular? The card means you can take books home.”

  “Verner Vanderloon,” Stub says, surprising himself. “I’d like a book of his.”

  “A book of Loon’s! I knew Loon. A recluse. No one has seen him in years.” He walks with Stub to the stacks. “We also have much of his library—a gift—in storage . . . no room left in the stacks.” And then Stub is alone among more books than he imagined possible, Vanderloon’s eight volumes, all with the familiar green leather bindings, tightly shelved together side by side within an ocean of books. The first thing he does is sit down on the floor and look at the spines. At that moment he vividly recalls Jenny and is freshly stricken by an old suffering.

  At some point it occurs to him that he could live in the library. He could read all day and sleep on the floor at night. Use the restrooms, and nobody would be the wiser. And when he got hungry he could steal a pie from the windowsill and run into the woods and eat his supper under the trees, among the ants, just as the animals do.

  Terrible things happen all the time, he thinks, but not today. Terrible things, beautiful things, things of such power, of such bewilderment, lucent and dark as tar. But right now the universe, restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence—a universe that flickers, its impatient forms blinking like fireflies in the night—astounds and delights him. Because he has in his hands a book of Vanderloon’s, its text scattered with peculiar sketches like the scrawl of restless spiders. Sketches of altars exhaling smoke, of volcanoes spitting gravel and sparks, of pearl divers and temple gates, of naked people wielding clubs, their faces lifted, stunned by the sight of a meteor.

  That night when Stub and his father are at supper, Stub remembers with nostalgia the family lunch they’d had in town not long before his grandmother passed. He asks if they could go again. His father says no, not ever, because the people in there make a man feel like a rag, like a rope of tripe. But Stub’s memory is radically different. The waitress had been friendly and she had playfully mussed his hair. She had wrapped a fresh piece of pie in a shiny piece of foil for him to take home. Later on when Stub considers his childhood, that simple gesture will be one of the most benevolent instances he can retrieve.

  Stub returns to the library often. Axel is always there for him, eager to talk, as he makes his way, doggedly, through Vanderloon’s books: Ancient Roots and Ways; Big Ears, Small Ears: Easter Island at War; Rules of Rage; Cannibal Ways; The Lost Archipelago; Primates in Paradise; Dream’s Dying. Axel advises: “Don’t let Loon get you down, Stub. It’s a dark vision.” He continues:

  “However much

  The trunk be mangled, with the limbs lopped off,

  The soul withdrawn and taken from the limbs,

  Still lives the trunk and draws the vital air.

  Lucretius,” he says.

  Stub cannot tell his father about Axel, Vanderloon, the library. Jiggs both resents the campus and fiercely protects his place in it. When Stub attempts to describe his first afternoon there, it is exactly as if he has unknowingly breached a taboo, desecrated the holy of holies. At home his isolation deepens. But instead of dying, his affections are displaced.

  When Jiggs Wiznet falls apart, conquered by his frayed nerves, his injurious nights, his dromedary days, his fatal dawns—Stub has long split. He has claimed the campus for himself, knows it intimately. He is pragmatic and a thief. He has mastered the art of invisibility.

  His first summer alone he bathes in the river, catches shad, builds fires. He sleeps in duck blinds, under a canoe, in an abandoned truck, graduates to the gym and showers there, uncovers an inexhaustible supply of soap. In the full heat of August he sleeps in the Dean’s formal garden, under the Founder’s Oak, on a purloined blanket. (The dorms are bountiful!) That winter he takes up residence in a spacious cabinet beneath the biology lab’s collection of bottled anomalies—a room rarely entered. The following summer he moves to the Utilities House, appreciates its homey smell of dust and lamp oil. He beds down in an expensive sleeping bag on the impressively thick and level floor, his few necessities stashed under the sink. The closet provides a wealth of paper towels and a pair of galoshes. Not much is locked, but when necessary he proves a master at rotating cams, knows how to stack them much as planets and their sun stack up during an eclipse. In this way the years pass. He is a recluse, a scholar. He is a dissembler. When in a tight spot, he invents identities. He is strange.

  The fall Stub turns nineteen he claims the library’s abandoned storage room—the very place where Vanderloon’s personal library is stowed away. Here
he builds himself a den within a maze of books. A scholar during the day, he roams the stacks, reads, takes notes in recesses provided with desks and ink. He finds a pen with a tip that appears to be made of gold. Dressed in preppy discards harvested from the dorms, he is inconspicuous. He watches the world around him unseen. A year passes. A child catches his attention. She appears often, suddenly, without warning—up a tree, on a roof, dashing across a lawn. Resplendent, she stands out among the faculty brats. Safely housed in the library, time on his hands, Stub begins a journal:

  The library space, if airless, is an oasis of privacy and peace. I have my reading lamp. It’s toasty. The toilet, pristine; the sink, ever ready for my little rituals. (A vagrant, I go about my days clean as a whistle.) Sometimes I think that had it all started out differently, I might have taken the world by storm rather than exhausting myself slinking about, purloining soap and other people’s galoshes. Yet I seem to have been born with a special instinct; it is amazing how instinctive this existence is if one is to be successful. Yet I often wonder—where does this invisibility lead me? What guides it? Whence the source of my impassioned scholarship (Vanderloon!) and, above all, impassioned interest in a little girl (and she is beautiful) named Asthma? What stars have marked us? What tropes of the blood?